How to Use a Flint and Steel Kit

Description

NativeSurvival Community Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxv1HGqDaf04BnpDIdQ4L1Q/videos

All the newest vids are posted advertisement free at the Community Channel, after 4 months they are published here with ads.

Website: http://nativesurvival.com/

Mitch, Mitchell, Alone, History, Channel, Survival, Nativesurvival.

Tags: native,survival,nativesurvival,flint,and,steel,fire,ignition,stone,mineral,rock,discussion,sparks,percussion,firesteel,chert,quartz,quartzite,jute,twine,tinder,bundle,tarp,rain,storm,shed,antler,outdoor,hunting,fishing,outside,hobbies,outdoor recreation,shooting sports,shooting tips,hunting tips

Video Transcription

Haymitch NATO survival a nice little rainstorm who came in today I figured we were talking about the foot of Steel fit don't go away alright let's steal kit now this is actually the long hunter kit you can find it on our site it's kind like the jacked up version of a fun steal kit it's a fun steal kit with a trapping kit inside it as well so it's like 15 snares in it

over up see you guys what they got in here let's get out some jute twine for tinder bundle

perfect for days like this where it's pouring out and it's gonna be incredibly tough to find it's in the bundle and weather like this so I was like to have a tender bundle with me inside my kit that's you know already dry in my primitive kit its birch bark and cat oh and in my my my Flint steel kit I just throw some juice wine gets the job done pretty good keep couple stones in here this one is piece of foot and we actually have Flint on a site separate well sub quartz on a site separate with two types of quartz we have standard courts in quartzite the difference is is that basically quartzite is quartz that is ground into a powder so it's quartz powder and that deep levels in the earth it's actually reconstituted into a rock again so started out as ports and it got about ground into sand basically like quartz sand and then that sand got superheated and super compressed back into its own stone and that looks pretty cool it's a very shiny and shimmer because of all those small particles that make up stone so it doesn't have the large crystals that a standard courts would have so we got both of those on our site to court sites of you know quite a bit more rather than standard quartz okay and I just have a steel striker is all the scenarios I keep in here now also in this kit at the bottom I have some chalk off and right next to it I have some truck cat tail so again you know charcloth takes an awesome spark cat tail does too you shouldn't take a spark what as easy as this struck off but it definitely tastes sparking keeps going you know I have a vid called truck a tow and you can check that out if you want and I like chalk cat tail because it's it's renewable it's a renewable resource in the woods I can find cat sale and I can throw my tin and then I can char good to go catch a spark good luck trying to find you know extra shirts to make char cloth in the woods so anyways this is just my quick little Flint steel kit I'll show you how to use it alright so it's not about stone stress real quick so the first piece I showed you is a piece of Flint there's another piece of Flint drobik sparks

here's a piece of natural quartz you see the large grain in there throws excellent spots as well you know this is quartzite sure you can see the difference here very finely grained because it's made of powder

this isn't a particularly shiny piece it's got a most like some some iron in it possibly right here dulling it it's kind of a brown piece well this is what you looking for it's kind of gray just Oh sparks do you can see you know this last stone it's called pyrite beating hot stones called pyrite pyrite sometimes looks very metallic like this and it fractures in these small little like step fractures it just kind of like crumbles okay

and it wasn't cut this way in this cube this is actually how the crystals the structure groves okay very interesting stuff now this will also throw a spark even though the hardness is between six and six and a half so that's all that's needed to strike a spark off of steel high carbon steel which is usually about between six and six and a half is the hardness that you need from there up there and up and it will cleave the metal off see if I can throw a spark off this boy

see that couple couple off there these edges are a little dull for but still throws box

now let's have a large piece of course it's pretty rounded so if I wanted to use this to throw sparks I would have to either rough up one of the edges well break it in half or break off a piece at the corner is then it becomes very sharp right now it's it's very it's very kind of rounded off and soft so I'd like a feel around there's a little sharpness there there's some sharpness right here right here but I guess no spark off that Jeff you sparks okay so that's just a quick run down a couple stones that I like to use you know quartz quartzite pyrite and Flint alright let's talk about the the actual striking of the stone there's a little bit of a technique there basically we want to find the edge that you want to use when you come down with the earth with your steel you don't want to come down with an angle that's not perpendicular next you're gonna beat up your edge and smash off the edge and you tend to only hit one one part of the steel you want to try to be perpendicular if you can to the edge and when you strike down barely skim the edge the whole distance okay and that's gonna allow the most steel to come off and therefore more sparks and it also doesn't beat the edge up quite as bad either because you're not digging in as much I actually missed three or four times before I actually hits I'm just moving a little bit closer so just bailing Nick it okay now you don't want to use your wrist because if you do that your wrist changes the angle we don't want the angle to change you want to use your elbow when you're striking okay night it changes as well see the angle changing but it's not as drastic okay so what I like to use is use part of my elbow right as I hit it to give it a little more a little more snap and I use my shoulder for the rest is my shoulder can just go up and down like this but as you go up like this and then bright the end I just kind of give a little snap with my elbow just tiny bit okay and you might see me rotate my wrist back a little bit when I do that so that way when it comes forward it's still straight as it hits Jeff so I just miss a few times to get a little closer until I know I'm there and then I can just keep banging out spots all day so the next concept that you want to understand is that there's two types two styles of organizing if you if you will more upholding your char cloth or your charred material that you intend to spark you can either put it on top of your stone this is the shelf style or you can put it on the let me see him and grab something for you top of my tent you can put it on the top of your tin or rock or what have you okay and then you would shower sparks down onto it so I'd strike it and my spot could fly down this is the shower technique so there's the shelf technique where you put the charcloth or chart material on top of your stone any strike and you try to have explode right into the material here or you lay it down and you hit and you hit your stone with your steel and you try to throw spots down onto it it's also another technique of how you strike not just wait for a cloth and that is keeping your steel still and making your stone the variable so basically this doesn't move and I just get my stone like this I mean I'm sorry hit my steel like this with my stuff a lot of guys do that for the shower technique okay so I do it like this they try to get the spots to land on their chart material that way so there's two ways to go about it usually on the Shelf technique the steel is the variable and the stone is the constant it does not move we just move this don't know that the steel onto the stone instead of vice versa and a shower technique can be either but most guys keep the opposite to keep the steel static or still and they use the that's the constant and they use a stone as the variable and that moves okay a lot of times they do that when they're using their knives so if you're using your knife

as your steal you pulled it down you strike it like this for the shower technique throw sparks off of it okay make sense

okay now so actually vice versa would be the opposite where if you want to use your your knife as your variable in you stone eyes are constant say like in the Shelf technique Jimmy you would hold your knife away from your blade you would keep your fingers off obviously off of your edge it was very firm grasp on it then you would strike down you get my cloth off of there so that I should ignite it just strike down another stone like this okay so those are the most common ways using a flint steel to ignite a charred material all right so now take a look at charcloth you might notice that there's a frayed edge see now if you go along the grain see that see that edge right there that's the best place to spark it has the most surface area it's you know it's more more fibrous which is very important when you're talking about tinder you know that that's why we bust up tinder bundles and things like that to make it more fibrous see if I can put my thumb behind if you see there it is right there

so you want to use that so one way of doing it on the stone would be to put that end

towards your edge see if I can do this right like that so I would strike the stone and try to ignite it right there now another way is folding technique where you would take your cloth see if I can get this work you can see what I'm doing and you would hold it and make like a wall out of your char cloth like this see how tall it is now so now nice my cloth isn't just laying on the stone the spots can fly over it sometimes when that happens so if you make like a wall out of it then I just did like an accordion effect or I kind of folded it on itself a few times so it's kind of stood up and I'm pinching the back up my thumb to hold it there so now it's a it's a taller larger target I'll just put it right up to the edge the taller target to catch the pass that's what I won with here and put on my top you can see better nice tall piece of char cloth towards the edge and see if we can get it to ignite okay yeah there we go see that brought him real good right there so I'm gonna take that put that on my bunion there now right my bundle they had it then we just stop this up okay so that's good now so the reason why I turn this way when I was doing it I held it held it above my mouth so heat rises right so I don't want to be poking down over it is that what I what I have to do is I have to blow on the Ember so if I'm blowing on the embers that means that the Ember it's facing me well if it's facing me then the heats going right out of the bundle and not through all the fibers at the bottom so you want to tilt it this way so now when I'm blowing here it has to go through all of it now I turned because the wind seemed to be coming from here I want that on my back to help push the key through the bundle and to give it extra oxygen that's better oxygen then then I think it's 16 percent of your breath here exhale is actually off even so it's sixteen percent somewhere on there so the air obviously in wind is a much higher percentage of oxygen than my breath so I want to let the wind help me if it can all right okay so basically that's some of the concepts on using a flint and steel you know you just use a stone with a hardness of six six and a half around there and up and you want to use a high carbon steel whether it be from a knife or whether it be from a steel on a flint steel kit these are called fire steels by the way the fire steels they people usually call fire steels like the company like my fire fire still see a Ferro rod okay so I just want to go over one more thing and that is I have a book I want to show you guys will play so hang tight okay so this book is the National Audubon Society feel good to North American rocks and minerals it's a pretty cool book this is a picture of pyrite and so is this so you can see it prefers to be knees cubes piece I have looks a lot like that but doesn't have as much iron and does a lot of looks like iron and if which causes it to be just solid like that my piece right here it's much cleaner okay so let's take a look at it this is pyrite it's on page 374 okay so as you can see color and luster often tarnish with a brown film of iron yep

sometimes it's iridescent metallic and that's what - - metallic okay hardness six to six and a half okay and that can throw a spark so you know that's a definite right there if you have six to six and a half you can start to throw sparks off a steel especially when it's a little softer like hard couple egg like high carbon steel pyrite pyres fire in Greek that's pretty cool okay so you know I think it's kind of a cool name because it's kind of like fire stone right

pyrite pretty neat because it does create fire with sparks off of steel so that is pretty cool ok let's talk about my old friend quartz okay I've done scouting vids on quartz a big fan of quartz it's barely Napa bull you can make points well it's very hard you should have to heat treat it but it does mix box it does make tools and it's incredibly common once you find it it's pretty much just loaded in that area so I'm a big fan of course hardness 7 it's white throw such good Sparks is that's a good solid spot throwing number right there so check this book out it's pretty awesome

alright let's go Mitch native survival I appreciate your views their comments in support thanks for joining me today working with the front steel clip see you in the next one to go